Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Brown researchers honored with Seed Funds, Salomon Awards

Twelve individual faculty researchers, including the School of Engineering's Shreyas Mandre and four interdisciplinary research teams were honored with University grants. Competition for Seed Funds and Salomon Awards, administered by the Office of the Vice President for Research, allows researchers to develop promising projects for possible external funding.

Four interdisciplinary teams at Brown University have been awarded a total of $307,000 to pursue novel research projects, and a dozen faculty received individual research awards of up to $15,000.

The winning individuals and teams were recognized at a ceremony today (Monday, March 14, 2011) at the Stephen Robert Campus Center. The competitive grants come courtesy of the Richard B. Salomon Faculty Research Awards and the Seed Funds administered by the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR).

“The Seed Funds and Salomon Awards that are given each year are among the most important ways we have at Brown to let faculty start new research areas and build new research programs,” said Clyde Briant, vice president for research. “They cover all areas of research at Brown and thus affect the entire campus. Building new research programs is key to the constant revitalization of Brown’s research programs, which in turn makes us a highly attractive university for faculty and students.”

One of the twelve Salomon Award winners was Shreyas Mandre, an assistant professor in the School of Engineering who is working on the development of a research program in thermoacoustics. Thermoacoustic devices exploit the temperature changes associated with acoustic waves to convert between mechanical and thermal energy. Due to the thermodynamically reversible nature of sound, the energy conversion is efficient. The potential for innovation is far-reaching, with applications in matters of global interest such as water desalination, waste energy harvesting, and spot cooling of electronic circuits. Mandre’s research program, predominantly for undergraduate researchers, proposes scaling down these devices to the centimeter scale and using them to develop new thermoelectric materials, which would open doors to a new field of mechanics in thermoacoustic materials.

The Seed Funds program has been run by OVPR since 2003. It is designed to help faculty compete more successfully for large-scale, interdisciplinary, multi-investigator grants. Investigators may propose projects with budgets up to $100,000. To date, about $3.5 million in Seed Funds has been given to research projects. From that investment, the researchers have obtained, on average, 10 times more funding from outside sources, according to OVPR.

The Salomon Awards were established to support excellence in scholarly work by providing funding for selected faculty research projects of exceptional merit. Recipients receive as much as $15,000. The Salomon Awards have been administered by OVPR since 2003, and a total of about $1.8 million has been awarded to 117 faculty.

This year’s Seed Fund winners will explore whether particular bacteria can produce biodiesel fuels, the impact of agriculture on air quality and global warming in New England, urban governance in India, and new treatments for sudden cardiac death.

One of this year’s Seed Fund recipients is Meredith Hastings, assistant professor of geological sciences at the Environmental Change Initiative. She is teaming with Jianwu Tang, a scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory, to measure in real time the flow of nitrogen gases in the soil from agricultural practices in New England, in order to better understand agriculture’s effects on the region’s air quality and acid rain formation, as well as its role in producing greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxide.

“This funding is allowing Jim and me to start a collaboration and get some initial data that would make it possible for us to do external fundraising,” said Hastings, who joined the Brown faculty in 2008. “It’s a jumpstart to our collaboration and a way to seek even more funding later.”

At the ceremony, three former Seed Fund winners — Katherine Smith in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Mark Johnson in the Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry, and Gabriel Taubin in the School of Engineering — said financial support from the University was critical to advancing their research to the point where they had enough results to seek external funding.